Hunter abilities/Pet abilities
Hunter pets can learn different abilities, similar to abilities learned by player characters. Most are active combat abilities, used to improve combat effectiveness, but there are also passive abilities. A hunter can specialize his or her pets, to some degree, by the choice of pet abilities, for example to make a pet a more effective tank vs a damage-dealer. Training Procedure You get the Pet Training skill from the Pet Trainer NPC along with the Feed Pet ability (the 2nd piece of Taming the Beast quest). It goes on your main character skill screen not on the beast mastery screen. The icon looks like a slingshot. Using that ability brings up a skill pane with a list of things you know how to teach a pet to do. You should first stable your current pet (if you wish to retain him) at a Stable master before setting out to tame a new pet to learn a new pet skill. The abilities learned by taming pets can be seen below. Once you tame a beast which possesses a desired pet skill or ability, you can learn the ability and afterwards train the new ability to other pets (that can learn the ability). It takes a little while after taming a pet to learn their special ability. The pet has to use the ability a few dozen times for you to learn it, so its recommend to fight in melee close to your new pet. *Untargeted abilities (Furious Howl, Dash, Dive, Prowl, etc.) can be learned outside of combat by simply clicking the skill icon every time it's available as you go about your other business. Once you have learned an ability from a pet, you can train it to any other pet capable of learning it, once the pet has built the required training points, which they get with increasing loyalty and by leveling up. Some pets can only learn certain abilities. Low level beasts have no innate special abilities. Level 8-10 beasts start to have the Level 1 abilities. 'Strider' class mobs have Cower, 'Cat' type mobs have bite, 'Bear' type mobs have claw for example. You can teach your pet growl level 1 as soon as the pet has gained some loyalty, and level 2 as soon as it has reached level 10. Pets which have skills already start with negative training point values, so it takes a bit longer to get them to positive training points. Keep feeding them and they will get there (by increasing their loyalty). Once your pet reaches level 20 you can teach it growl 3. Starting with growl level 3, you need to buy levels of it from the pet trainer. Pet Skill Calculators Just like the many Talent Build Calculators out there for classes, there are a few Hunter Pet Skill Calculators to help you plan how to spend your pets training points and minimize leftover unusable points. These calculators are all third-party, not Blizzard's, and therefore can fall out of date with content patches. Current as of Oct 6 2007: * http://petopia.brashendeavors.net/html/articles/resources_calcs.shtml Skills * DPF : Damage per focus, or threat per focus. Past changes Originally, there were 6 basic pet abilities: Bite, Claw, Cower, Growl, Dash and Dive. * v1.8.0 added eight more * v1.9.0 added 3 more. * v2.1.0 added 2 more. See also Category:Pet abilities